Examine the Gandhian idea of village community as an ideal unit of self – governance. (2012, 20 Marks)
For Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, India lives in her villages, and swaraj that did not begin there would be a change of masters. His Gram Swaraj makes the village community the primary site of self-rule, not an administrative tier. Examining the claim means testing its normative logic against the sociology of the Indian village and the record of Panchayati Raj.
The Gandhian Claim
- A complete republic. In Harijan (26 July 1942) he described each village as independent of its neighbours for its own vital wants, and yet inter-dependent for many others in which dependence is a necessity. It grows its food and cotton, and has its own school, hall, waterworks and cooperatives.
- Government. A panchayat of five, elected annually by all adult villagers, men and women, combines legislative, executive and judicial functions. Its sanction is not police but satyagraha and non-cooperation by the community.
- Why the village? It is the scale at which face-to-face participation is possible, individual self-rule can become collective self-rule, and production by the masses can replace factory concentration. Centralisation, he held, cannot be sustained without force, so decentralisation is a requirement of ahimsa. The village is the core of the “oceanic circle”, with outer tiers serving, not commanding, the inner.
- Lineage. The image of India’s “little republics” came from Charles Metcalfe (1830) and Henry Sumner Maine‘s Village-Communities in the East and West (1871). Gandhi turned an imperial description into a normative programme, later carried forward by Vinoba Bhave‘s gramdan and Jayaprakash Narayan‘s communitarian democracy.
Testing the Claim: Theory and Sociology
- B. R. Ambedkar (Constituent Assembly, 4 November 1948) called the village a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism. For Dalits it was the unit of caste domination, with no exit, so he made the individual the constitutional unit.
- M. N. Srinivas and A. M. Shah (1960) exposed the myth of village self-sufficiency. Villages were always tied to markets, castes and states beyond them.
- Jawaharlal Nehru told Gandhi in October 1945 that a village was usually backward in intellect and culture, and that progress could not grow from a backward environment.
- Scale and gender. Self-sufficiency cannot finance infrastructure, defence or modern welfare, and elected women often find their office run by male relatives (“sarpanch-pati”).
Testing the Claim: The Institutional Record
- The Constituent Assembly placed panchayats in Article 40, a Directive Principle. The 73rd Amendment (1992) gave them constitutional status, the Gram Sabha (Art. 243A) and 29 Eleventh-Schedule subjects. PESA (1996) gave Scheduled Area gram sabhas power over community resources.
- The closest approach to Gandhi came at Niyamgiri. After the Supreme Court’s April 2013 ruling, the Dongria Kondh gram sabhas rejected bauxite mining, and the Union government then refused clearance.
- Yet devolution remains shallow. The national devolution index stood at only 43.9% (2021-22), and panchayats raise about 1% of their revenue themselves. The VB–G RAM G Act, 2025, replacing MGNREGA, has gram panchayats prepare works plans, but within four centrally set themes and with a 60:40 Centre–state funding pattern. The village implements more than it governs.
- Reservation has placed over 14.5 lakh women in panchayat office, about 46% of elected representatives, a gain Gandhi’s annual panchayat did not contemplate as a guarantee.
Conclusion
The village community is an ideal unit of participation and resource stewardship. Niyamgiri and the Gram Sabha show its democratic value. It is not an ideal sovereign unit, because without constitutional rights above it, local majorities can reproduce caste and gender domination. The sound synthesis is subsidiarity under the Constitution: Gandhi’s village for deliberation, Ambedkar’s rights for protection.